Sales excellence что это
What are the secrets of Sales Excellence?
Do you often wonder:
Is Sales Excellence a function of strategy, process, structure or people? One of these? Some of these? All of these? Or is it something more?
What drives sales excellence across organizations irrespective of size, industry, geography and economic conditions?
What makes sales leaders tick?
In search of answers to these questions and more, Mercuri International undertakes periodic worldwide surveys. The latest of these – the Sales Excellence Survey 2017 — commissioned in mid-2016, uncovers some of the secrets of sales excellence from top performing companies across 20 countries and 12 industry categories, involving 926 respondents over 80 percent comprising CEOs and Sales Managers.
Read more and download the complete report of the Sales Excellence Survey 2017 here
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Виртуальные отношения — Цифровизация социальных кодов
Личные встречи часто были необходимы для установления отношений и создания доверия между продавцами и покупателями. Но ситуация меняется…
Как руководить мобильным и географически удаленным отделом продаж B2B?
Обладает ли ваша организация компетенциями, навыками, процессами, возможностями и цифровыми приложениями, чтобы стать организацией продаж мирового уровня?
Война на два фронта — почему некоторые из крупнейших сражений в области Управления Ключевыми Клиентами являются внутренними
Большинство людей считают, что самой большой проблемой для менеджера по работе с ключевыми клиентами является необходимость понимать своего клиента, но только ли это необходимо?
Каждый год Mercuri International предоставляет компаниям из более чем 50 стран возможность достичь высочайших результатов в продажах. Мы помогаем нашим клиентам как локально, так и глобально, предлагая им индивидуальные решения и профессиональные навыки в конкретной индустрии. Мы повышаем доход через людей, предоставляя им инструменты и процессы, способные справиться с любой задачей в области продаж.
Driving Sales Excellence in 2021: What, Why, and How?
In practice, this meant painting the floor of the team truck white to spot impurities that undermine bike maintenance, hiring a surgeon to educate team members on ideal hand-washing techniques to avoid illnesses, making athletes sleep in the same postures every night, and other such countless initiatives. Why does this work? How can such small improvements accumulate into such head-turning results? And most importantly, what can we learn here that can be implemented in sales and account management?
Sales Excellence: Getting Ready for 2021
The What and Why of Sales Excellence
What Ideal Sales Excellence Looks Like
For Sales Excellence and Sales acceleration to function at its ideal capacity, leaders and the organization at large need to live and breathe the practice. For a concept that involves attention to detail at unprecedented capacity, anything less than 100% buy-in would be a shame. What does such dedication look like in practice?
At the foundational level, Sales Excellence strategy begins with staunch onboarding, training, and up-skilling support for salespeople in a manner that grows into the shoes of a pan-organization culture. Sales Excellence means that salespeople are not only attuned to the best practices of sales but also work closely with other departments (such as marketing) to better understand the personalized needs of every buyer.
Key ingredients to formulate an ideal Sales Excellence framework includes:
Impact of Sales Excellence on Deal Closures
In a traditional capacity, sales are driven by taking into account how effective the entire organization or sales department is in executing their roles and responsibilities. But such monitoring is often undertaken at a bird’s eye level with KPIs catering to teams or entire sales functions. Sales Excellence goes way beyond this and brings a fundamental shift in this practice.
Sales Excellence questions not just the leaders or the sales functions but every individual salesperson. This means monitoring metrics such as the deal closure time, deal win rate, the training and proficiency levels of salespeople with the tools, organizational support, and the like. What does this mean?
When the spotlight is on every individual salesperson, improved deal closure is nothing more than a natural byproduct of the practice. Revisiting the story of the British Cycling team, focusing on every detail in the small picture ultimately has a significant cumulative impact on the big picture.
How to Measure Sales Excellence
Now that you know what Sales Excellence is all about, the next step is figuring how to measure it. The age of Sales Enablement and Sales Transformation has paved the way for many key metrics and frameworks that need to be put to ideal use to measure success in Sales Excellence. Here is a round-up of the key metrics that you should be focusing on:
Tips to Achieve and Improve Sales Excellence
At its heart, Sales Excellence is more of a cultural and mindset shift than a mere focus on metrics. This calls for the right combination of processes and practices that aid to achieve and boost Sales intelligence from the ground up.
Leading best practices in this regard include:
1. Investing in ideal sales technology
No process can ever be 100% streamlined and there is always a scope. With sales, optimization can come in the form of multiple possible technologies, leaving you time and attention-strapped while making an informed decision. The right sales technology tool will win you back valuable lost time, deliver key analytics that shapes both short and long-term strategies, drive business intelligence, and boost sales engagement. The key lies in knowing which tools to invest in and which ones to skip. A simple tech stack automatically translates to better sales efficiency, easier training & maintenance, improved sales effectiveness, and eventually achieve higher sales excellence.
2. Consistent up-skilling and training
A culture of continuous improvement and sales training is the most comfortable boat to be in. Not only does it arms the sales rep with the most recent knowledge of the services or products, but it also keeps them up to date with customer management strategies and trains them on how to best steer deals and conversations towards success. For successful implementation, sales training collateral needs to be at the foundation and be integrated with the sales enablement platform. This would empower salespeople to navigate through the complexities of customer engagement and grow with the business.
3. Sales planning and opportunity scoping
Sales Excellence involves digging out the right opportunities for growth and an intuitive (read data-oriented) understanding of where the market is heading shortly. Based on this understanding, key opportunities can then be matched with the right sales reps at the right time. Three Key ingredients that come in handy here include:
4. Perfecting customer pitches
So you have identified the right opportunities and allocated the best fit sales reps to the jobs. But how good are their pitches? The first optimization step here would be to segment your customer base and charting out the specific problems that each of them faces. Sales reps can then listen to customers, identify the opportunities, and match the customers to the ideal value proposition. By bringing all this together, sales leaders can define the most ideal pitches for every customer segment which can directly bring up the sales excellence.
5. Creating an ideal operating model
It would make no sense for sales reps to be ready for any opportunity if they are unable to identify them in the first place, deliver the wrong pitch, or be inconsistent with their execution. As a sales leader, what you need is a well-defined operating model that can drive critical decisions in an ongoing capacity. This would include having a centralized strategy and guidelines, performance management, operational planning, sales forecasting, and more.
6. Being open to change
A takeaway for every person that is involved in the sales process, Sales Excellence at the cultural level includes the realization that there is always scope for improvement. The best of sales reps (and leaders alike) are always striving for improvement, inviting change as a constant part of the process. Exploring new opportunities and avenues to execute old processes should be second nature and вЂchange’ the only comfort zone.
7. Driving social skills
Sales are a people’s arena. It pays to be social and good with people management. A charming personality seems to be more intuitive and natural at driving conversations and closing leads simply because it appears to be fewer sales.
While some sales reps are naturally good at this, others might be lacking in this regard and more process-oriented. Nonetheless, including relevant and consistent support as a part of cross-selling up-skilling activities can help to navigate related complexities. For long-term change, you can also always relook your hiring protocols and include effective communication and social skills as key prerequisites!
The Verdict
In case you want to explore why DemandFarm is the ideal product for your organization, check out the blog on the Battle ofВ KAM technologyВ software where we consider multiple KAM software likeВ Revegy, Altify, and others and pit them against DemandFarm.
В штате фармкомпаний появляется новая позиция – менеджер по эффективности маркетинга
Внедрение в компании функции менеджера по эффективности маркетинга (Marketing Excellence) помогает оптимизировать бизнес-процессы и повысить эффективность бизнеса, считают эксперты фармрынка.
О задачах, решаемых с помощью специалистов в области Marketing Excellence и профиле их компетенций, шла речь 15 декабря на встрече участников профессионального сообщества Knowledge Management Pharma и SFE Academy.
Функция Marketing Exсellence стала вводиться в фармацевтических компаниях сравнительно недавно, отметила лидер SFE Academy Наталия Каширина. По ее словам, необходимость внедрения такой функции вызвана изменением ситуации на рынке, а также появлением новых каналов продвижения.
Сегодня мало кто может рассчитывать на серьезное увеличение бюджетов на маркетинг. Поэтому компании пытаются найти ресурсы повышения эффективности за счет оптимизации бизнес-процессов, усиления кросс-функционального взаимодействия. И здесь одной из ключевых фигур становится менеджер по Marketing Excellence, который выступает как аналитик и координатор процессов.
«Потребность в таких специалистах продиктована временем, – отметила Наталия Каширина. – Еще десять лет назад мы и представить себе не могли, что компании будут активно использовать digital каналы. А сегодня это реальность. Но кто в компании определяет эффективность таких коммуникаций? По сути, никто. Редко какой продакт-менеджер четко может ответить на вопрос, каков на выходе KPI, как его измерить. Чтобы это понимать, в компании должна быть выстроена серьезная система аналитики, на основе которой делаются подобные расчеты. То же самое касается регулярной аналитики систем CLM – во многих компаниях она отсутствует».
О том, как соотносится CLM (Close Loop Marketing – система маркетинговой коммуникации sales force с целевой аудиторией) с функцией Marketing Excellence, рассказал генеральный директор компании Breffi Евгений Гордеев. По его словам, многие маркетологи рассматривают CLM просто как презентацию на айпэде. Хотя на самом деле это огромная возможность на основе обратной связи от CLM проанализировать, как работает маркетинг. И сделать осмысленный вывод: почему именно в таком формате, с такими ключевыми точками, такой продолжительности должна быть презентация, какие профили должны быть в нее зашиты. К примеру, бессмысленно делать презентацию на 25 слайдов, если выяснится, что визит медпредставителя в среднем длится 7 минут.
Как отмечает Наталия Каширина, важная составляющая функции Marketing Excellence – обучение маркетологов. Этой категорией персонала в компаниях практически никто не занимается – маркетинг, как правило, развивается сам по себе.
Иногда компании вводят должность менеджера по Marketing Excellence, но в зоне его ответственности только сфера обучения, но это не совсем правильно, считает эксперт. «Эта функция может быть представлена гораздо шире. Она должна идти в параллель с функцией Sales Force Effectiveness, когда SFE отвечает за эффективность продаж, а Marketing Exсellence – за эффективность маркетинга», – уверена Наталия Каширина.
По ее мнению, если в компании создается отдел Marketing Excellence, руководить им должен человек уровня директора по маркетингу либо это может быть маркетинг-менеджер, чья квалификация приближается к уровню директора по маркетингу. То есть речь идет о наличии компетенций, которые позволяют заниматься стратегическим управлением, созданием стандартов работы всего маркетинга компании. Такой сотрудник должен обладать опытом как в Rx-направлении, так и в ОТС.
«На мой взгляд, на первый план требований к менеджерам по Marketing Exсellence выходит когнитивная гибкость, – сказала Наталия Каширина. – Охват такого количества зон ответственности, которое предполагает работа в должности, требует системности мышления, умения работать в режиме многозадачности, быстро перестраиваться с решения одной задачи на другую».
Four Steps to Sales Excellence: How to Define, Measure, and Sustain Sales Growth
There’s no doubt that Serena Williams is an exceptional athlete. Like others at the top of their game, she knows that excellence is more than just a goal: It’s a state of being. But she would also be quick to remind you that excellence isn’t inherited. Rather, it’s earned — through a combination of processes and environments that enable people to do their best work.
Many in the business world would agree. Desire for continuous outperformance is an imperative of any fast-growing company. But like the great athletes of our age, modern leaders know growth doesn’t come from pure luck. Excellence starts behind the scenes.
In this guide, we’re pulling back the curtain to show you what goes into defining, achieving, and maintaining sales excellence and will answer such questions as:
What Is Sales Excellence?
Sales excellence is defined as the consistent outperformance of key growth objectives, achieved by strategic, cross-functional initiatives. These initiatives are key inputs of your revenue engine: your training, tools, enablement, and culture. Together, these factors create an environment that builds and supports high-performing sellers, thus delivering sales excellence.
How you develop each factor is dependent on your business, industry, and goals. Just as a ballerina’s peak performance looks vastly different from a quarterback’s, your version of “excellence” might vary from that of your peers — and even your competitors. However, there are shared methods of measuring your outputs to determine whether or not you’ve achieved sales excellence. We’ll address that next.
How Do You Measure Sales Excellence?
You can measure sales excellence with existing sales analytics by focusing on:
The exact metrics within each category will vary based on your business objectives. However, recent research on the preferred sales metrics of leading businesses offer a starting point. In each category, here are the top five most-tracked metrics:
The performance, productivity, and proficiency data from this table can reveal whether or not you have achieved sales excellence by demonstrating, first, if sales is achieving its objectives and, second, exactly how that’s happening and who is contributing.
If sales regularly meets or exceeds your goals, it’s clear you have the processes and programs in place to achieve sales excellence. In this case, the next step is to determine how to keep raising the bar.
However, if you find that sales teams consistently fail to meet targets, then granular metrics, such as the ones above, will help uncover roadblocks and enable you to resolve them.
How Do You Achieve Sales Excellence?
Sales excellence is achieved through the right combination of processes and programs including:
This is because the tools and processes will set you on the path to achieving sales excellence. Let’s take a closer look at how to optimize each of these elements.
1. Expand Your Sales Enablement Use Cases
Why It Matters
Sales enablement is responsible for enabling revenue teams to easily and effectively bring your products to market.
How to Optimize
Start by understanding the sales enablement maturity model. The five stages — ad hoc, reactive, managed, data-driven, and optimized — show an evolution of sales enablement processes and areas of responsibility. Most companies fall somewhere between reactive and managed. That’s because businesses often invest in sales enablement solutions for a specific need (like content management) and fail to fully close the gap between content, rep comprehension, and action.
You can dramatically improve your sales performance by maximizing solution use cases. Once early-stage needs like content are met, consider your training and onboarding experiences — do these essential pieces of guidance live within your enablement platform? What about your sales communications or competitive research? Or your sales methodology?
For optimized enablement, integrate these elements into the same platform reps already rely on for content. Once in place, you can measure the closed-loop impact of your enablement initiatives, continue to optimize them, and fully deliver sales excellence.
2. Invest Wisely in New Sales Technology
Why It Matters
The right sales technology can win back valuable time, streamline processes, and deliver powerful analytics to inform your strategy.
How to Optimize
Tech-stack bloat is a real concern. With some many options to choose from, it can be difficult to know which tools to invest in and which to skip.
Start by covering your bases. Core components of a tech stack include customer relationship management (CRM), business intelligence, sales enablement, sales engagement, and sales readiness. These five tools form a data-driven ecosystem that enhance reps’ workflow.
Future investments will likely be in the following categories: account-based sales and marketing, communications/conferencing, performance management, market intelligence, lead generation, and contract management. These strategic additions should either increase sales efficiency or effectiveness — the twin pillars of growing sales productivity.
You can determine where to invest by analyzing roadblocks in your customer journey or sales cycle. Interview reps and see where deals stall out or why they’re struggling to meet quota. If for instance, sales struggles to efficiently researching customers, a market intelligence platform might be the next step. Or, if your deals are delayed due to proposal generation or signature processing, perhaps you’re ready for a contract management solution.
However you build your tech stack, be sure that each investment adds value — and never shy away from upgrading solutions that don’t scale with you.
3. Commit to Continuous Sales Training
Why It Matters
Ongoing sales training prepares reps with the knowledge of what to know, say, show, and do for every customer conversation.
How to Optimize
To maximize the impact of sales training and coaching, several mechanisms must be in place. As mentioned earlier, training materials must be integrated with your sales enablement platform. By providing guidance and additional resources inline with sales content, salespeople can easily access the materials they need to prepare, when they need them — before critical customer conversations.
Additionally, training must be a continuous process. Materials should be updated frequently and rep proficiency measured often. Doing so ensures both content and reps stay fresh on product offerings, key messaging, and industry trends.
Finally, you must invest in coaching. Not only does this mean preparing reps through role play scenarios, call reviews, and one-on-one mentorship, but also by ensuring sales managers have been trained. After all, the guidance sales leaders deliver will only be as strong as your investment in their growth.
By building a robust training program, you’ll not only enable reps to navigate customer engagements, but empower them to grow throughout the course of their tenure at your business.
4. Build a Supportive Sales Culture
Why It Matters
Good sales culture enables reps to do great work and ensures their long-term loyalty.
Begin by building a tight relationship with human resources. This function can provide additional support and resources as you implement culture initiatives.
Once your teams are aligned, take measure of your current sales culture. Ideally, you have fostered a welcoming, learn-it-all environment that enhances employees strengths and helps them overcome weakness. Surveys, one-on-one conversations, and observations are all effective ways of checking your culture’s pulse.
Ask yourself — where are your areas of growth? Do employees feel like they can make mistakes? Do they feel empowered to take initiative, or are they process-bound? Does your compensation model encourage ethical behavior? Do salespeople feel incentivized to stay and if so, why?
The answers to these questions will reveal whether or not your culture helps or hinders sales excellence. Initiatives, such as mentorship programs, team happy hours, employee recognition, and diversity and inclusion investments, can all move your culture in the right direction and ensure salespeople can perform at their best.
Maintaining a State of Sales Excellence
Use this guide to start operationalizing your sales excellence initiatives. By maximizing your sales excellence inputs (processes, tools, people, and culture) and validating them with data (performance, proficiency, and productivity metrics), you can not only achieve sales excellence — but sustain it over the long-term.
The Highspot Team works to create and promote the Highspot sales enablement platform, which gives businesses a powerful sales advantage to engage in more relevant buyer conversations and achieve their revenue goals. Through AI-powered search, analytics, in-context training, guided selling, and 50+ integrations, the Highspot platform delivers enterprise-ready sales enablement in a modern design that sales reps and marketers love.
What is Sales Excellence?
What is sales excellence?
What is sales excellence? Well, excellence is an amorphous and difficult thing to not only define but also achieve. We could spend years in therapy talking about how to know when you’ve achieved excellence in both your personal and professional life. When will all these feelings of inadequacy and inability to measure up to Bill who lives next door ever subside? Probably never! But I don’t get paid to be a therapist so that’s fine, you’ll be fine, deep breaths. Instead we’re going to talk about sales excellence because that’s just what we do over here.
Like we just talked about, defining sales excellence is a difficult task. Even more difficult is tacking on objective measures to sales excellence that allows an organization to say, “radical, we are most excellent at sales!” Every organization is going to have their own unique blend of metrics and measurements they use to determine their standing. To borrow a phrase, you know sales excellence when you see it.
However a sales excellence definition in broad strokes goes like this: Sales excellence is the measure of how successful not only an entire organization is at closing more deals, but also a measurement of the success of individual sellers. Sales excellence takes into account how quickly deals are closed, how many deals are won, a sellers comfort with all of the tools at their disposal, an organization’s ability to support sellers, and much more.
All the preamble is of course not to say you should just throw a dart at the wall and be done with it, there are actionable steps you and your organization can take today to start measuring sales excellence. And by gosh, we’re going to talk about those steps!
Defining Sales Excellence and Measuring Sales Excellence
One of the most important steps your organization will have to take is defining sales excellence internally. You will need to have frank discussions about what success looks like and how success is achieved. Maybe throw some chairs around and really let loose. Actually, don’t do that. Forget I said that, OK? Can we just move on with the blog? Great, thanks.
Anyway, those discussions should settle some benchmarks for obvious things like quotas, deals sourced, meetings held, engagement effort, account mapping, etc. etc. Those are classic sales metrics that reveal the success of a seller.
But since we’re in the era of sales enablement you also need to start thinking about how other metrics factor into sales excellence. Sellers aren’t just going door-to-door anymore. That died with Willy Loman. Sellers must be finely-tuned machines that are in touch with not only sales best practices, but also have a keen understanding of Marketing’s efforts, and—especially—be attuned to the personal needs of each buyer.
To account for these shifts in the duties of a seller your metrics for sales excellence should consider these things:
I’m going to repeat myself here because that’s important for the conclusion of any piece of writing. Every organization is going to have their own unique formula for determining sales excellence. But don’t get hung up on just the traditional sales metrics. Oftentimes there are other measurements that can reveal important trends and reveal sales excellence in their own right. Finally, always remember to be excellent to each other.